Why Do People Continue to Play Borderlands After 100
I'm gonna start this off by saying that I used to be a huge Borderlands fan. Borderlands 2 still ranks up there as one of the best games ever made, certainly one of the best looter-shooters, and a game I've spent literally over 1,000 hours playing. Combine that with the original Borderlands, The Pre-Sequel, Tales from the Borderlands, and now Borderlands 3, and I've got close to 2,000 hours in this franchise.
I guess I'm what you'd call "invested."
I didn't know a lot about Gearbox as a company. All I knew is that they made Borderlands, a franchise that could do no wrong. I know that the company had made a few missteps, notably with Duke Nukem Forever and Battleborn, but hey, nobody's perfect. They knew what they were doing with Borderlands, and that was good enough for me. They even gave me a totally free DLC for Borderlands 2 that made me sink YET ANOTHER 100 hours in that damn game.
So when Borderlands 3 was announced, I basically pre-ordered. Not on Epic, mind you. While I don't really care about a game going Epic exclusive, I know that modern games usually release with a few bugs and glitches, and waiting for the Steam release would give Gearbox time to iron things out. Plus, all my friends had already decided to get it on Steam, so waiting the extra 6 months made sense.
But in the meantime, I learned a lot about Gearbox, and I didn't like what I found out. And at the end of those 6 months? I got the worst surprise of all: Borderlands 3 was bad. Real bad.
Not My Borderlands
Borderlands 3 doesn't hold a candle to Borderlands 2, and it's not just because the game doesn't have an iconic villain like Handsome Jack to tie it all together. Although the Calypso Twins are truly awful as both characters and drivers of the plot, being little more than distorted parodies of evil YouTubers that escaped from a Black Mirror episode, there are a lot of things wrong with Borderlands 3 compared to so many other games.
Let's start with the story. It's long, meandering, and just seems to take you to random places to meet past characters, have you do a few things, and then sends you on your way. Which would be fine if there were some great jokes and clever writing to tie it all together, but it doesn't. Everyone you meet who isn't from a previous game is either some bizarre caricature or a complete farce with lines that seem written by a 50-year-old who's trying just a little too hard to appeal to the Kids These Days™.
In Borderlands 2, side quests either took you to see Pandora's less-explored corners to learn more about the characters or lore (which yes, does exist), or they asked you to shoot some jackoff in the face for a cheap laugh. Borderlands 3 has none of the character or lore exploration and the laughs are so cheap they're no longer considered legal tender in 50 states.
Pacing issues are rampant, the levels are enormous, convoluted and impossible to navigate without frequently looking at your map, and even the core shooter gameplay feels like an amateurish throwback to the original Borderlands where rockets and single-shot weapons were largely useless.
I know I'm not alone in my criticisms. Borderlands 3 has gotten some rave reviews, but it's also gotten some pretty abysmal ones too, and you'll hear those reviewers pan the games flat and uninspired.
Borderlands 3 feels like the first attempt at a Borderlands game rather than the third iteration of an established franchise. And it turns out, there's a very good reason for that.
The Changing Of The Gearbox Guard
Between Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3, Gearbox went through a lot of changes. First, the main creative team that penned Borderlands 2 left. Lead writer Anthony Burch went to write a TV show on Hulu, and co-writer Mikey Neumann left in 2017 due to medical issues. Creative director Paul Hellquist left in 2015 for Robot Entertainment (of Orcs Must Die! fame), and even Claptrap voice actor David Eddings, the goddam mascot of the whole franchise, left in 2017 on Very Bad Terms.
On top of that Gearbox expanded into Canada with Gearbox Studio Quebec, a team of entirely new game developers, and tasked them with doing much of the heavy lifting for Borderlands 3. Although we give Gearbox credit for not instituting a heavy crunch schedule for making the game, this is a first-run for Gearbox Quebec, which explains why Borderlands 3 seems to lack much of the polish of its predecessor.
So we've got a largely new studio working under a new creative team and they're all tasked with making another Borderlands game. You can't really blame them for not hitting it out of the park on their first try.
But you know who we can blame? The only guy still in the room, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford.
The Elephant In The Room
It's pretty clear at this point that Pitchford is really only in it for the money and not much else. He pinches pennies at every opportunity, going so far as to hire a new voice actor for Rhys just because he didn't want to pay union rates. He didn't even bother to pay Eddings at all because the two hate each other's guts over a certain $12 million that was diverted from Gearbox bonuses to Pitchford's private account (and up until recently was the center of a legal dispute with Gearbox's former lawyer).
That's also not an isolated incident. Pitchford seems to have also denied Gearbox employees (including the new guys over at Gearbox Quebec) promised performance bonuses based on Borderlands 3's sales. The reason? Apparently sales didn't meet expectations, although Gearbox's publisher, 2K Games, said that Borderlands 3 is the biggest game in franchise history.
And as if trying to out-do Bobby Kotick as the world's most evil games capitalist wasn't enough, he also might have had a USB drive with underage pornography on it. Allegedly. That was also part of the $12 million lawsuit, but Pitchford never provided court-ordered documents, so we may never know for sure.
We can go on at length at the many awful things this guy has done to his company and employees, but the point here is that the rot comes from the top. If Borderlands 3 is a bad game (and it is), it's because this guy had a hand in making it.
The fact that Borderlands 3 sold so well and is basically the only franchise keeping Gearbox afloat virtually guarantees a Borderlands 4 will be made someday. I won't be buying it, and neither should you.
Source: https://www.thegamer.com/why-play-borderlands-randy-pitchford-gearbox/
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